You'll never get a desktop app out of Virgin.  You get the web interface or the phone app.  Personally i'd buy a phone, install the app on it, don't put a sim in it and store it powered down in a safe when not in use.  I have a family member that does exactly that.  Gets the phone, powers it up, connects to wifi, does what he needs, powers down and puts back in the safe.

The one problem with the web app is moving money.  There is a £500 daily limit.  On the phone app it's unlimited, which i think is crazy personally given how easily phones get stolen.  Which brings me back to the phone in the safe.  The other one if you can remember the passcodes and details (you probably can if you use the web portal) is to install the app on your phone when you need to do something and then immediately uninstall it afterwards.  That's what i do with another family member when they want to move money into ISA's and send money to people.  Don't allow google or apple to store any passwords for anything banking if you do use a phone.

Personally I have a banking app on my phone, but I also retain the web portal access.  Funnily enough though I can use VM on my Firefox, but prefer Chromium for anything financial.  I have limits set on everything in my account and to change them requires a lot of jumping through hoops, it isn't straightforward.  Like chip and pin is set to £10 max, which limits damage if I lost the card.

Also Natwest does pay interest, but not on current accounts.  if you throw the money into the digital saver account it gets somewhere around 4.5% per year but only on a balance up to £5000.  Many banks have a similar system, so you could potentially have many accounts holding a limited amount earning interest.  It's all about gaming the system.

The one thing you have to watch out for if you have lots of money earning interest is the personal savings account limits.  If you make more than £1000 per year in interest and are not working, you have to fill out a self assessment and might get taxed.  If you don't and you go over it, expect a letter from HMRC.  They got really hot on this in the last couple of years.  i know a couple of retired people who got stung for this last year.  If you are working they generally adjust your tax code to pull the tax off upstream. ISA everything you can to avoid the tax man.

I grabbed Slackware64-15.0 last night. I found a brand new ADATA 480gb SSD in my spare drives box (well found several actually so forward thinking has saved me from the AI chip pricing debacle), so I'm squared away for a new install, maybe tonight.  I'll be honest and say I will probably just go to Slackware.  It's the cycle of things.  I've been on Debian/Devuan now since before Devuan was created, back on Debian Jessie, when the whole systemd saga started. But was on Slackware64 13.37 before that for 2-3 years.  Now it's back to where it all started. Took me all of 31 years to realise what I started with is still probably the best distro I ever used.

Thing is, what can i do.  Stuff like OpenVPN is always out of date on Devuan.  Like the current version is 2.7.7 and the latest version available on Chimaera was substantially less than that (maybe in the 2.4 versions), plus there have been some serious security holes patched in some of those releases.  Luanti was another one I had to build myself because the Debian version was very out of date (couldn't get mineclonia to run).  Other times you go to install something and it needs some specific program or library which isn't available on Devuan/Debian/Ubuntu, so you have to build it yourself to get everything to work.  Had that when trying to install a network driver for an obsucure wifi adapter and it wanted a certain library that did not exist on debian, which i had to build myself.

Years back I opened a thread about this when using Debian and the response was essentially tough sht.  We can't help you.  So I learnt to help myself.  Linux is the quintessential hackers operating system after all and it is geared for dealing with exactly this problem.

It's actually not that hard to do with Devuan.  I mark any package I intend to build myself, that has an available package with hold, in apt.  Then build the package and install to /usr/local like i've always done.

This one thing irks me the most.  I don't mind updating stuff to fix security issues, but beyond that, I don't want new functionality. I just want it to work today, like it did yesterday and ten years ago.  If it does that i will be forever happy.  I think the nearest distro to that is probably LFS.  I always found Gentoo to be a bit too clunky.  Arch was nice, but too much systemd nowadays.  Slackware was very good, but you can bollocks up the system rather easily with updates and a lot of the time never be able to get it back to a working order.

One moan I have about Xorg is I have had messages in the logs about how my mouse and keyboard are slow (Logitech K120 wired keyboard and Razer Deathadder).  Now these never used to happen before.  Also it tells me my computer is too slow. It's a Ryzen 7 3800x with 64GB Ram and an RTX 2080 Ti.  It is about as far from being slow as it can possibly be.  I read a year back it's an issue in DirectInput, but I haven't worked out how to fix it so far.  When i tried Daedalus the same errors presented, so not fixed yet.

As to the keyboard and mouse not working, the fix is to add your user to the Plugdev group.  Then they work.  I learnt that one while trying to make Daedalus work in a Qemu VM.

PEBKAC!!!

So i fixed it, after reading this thread.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam- … sues/11921

What could possibly cause the two steam components from not being able to communicate with each other.

So I was trying to set the system so eth0 wasn't enabled at boot until a script in rc.local brought it up at the end (after doing some stuff to the network connection and I forgot I did it).  So I spent an hour trying to make this work yesterday.  I finally used the networking script in init.d, without even considering that if I told it not to setup networking that it would kill lo as well.  So no loopback enabled.  eth0 came up on the script like intended, but I never enabled localhost.  So it appears steam and steamwebhelper communicate together over localhost and since there was no localhost, it crapped out.

So I typed "ifup lo" and fired up steam and it works, no errors.

You live to learn.

My ISP completely blocks Wireguard.  No dns resolution when using it, can't ping anything and when I asked one of their tech support (a friend from Uni), was told the unofficial policy was to block all wireguard connections via some adaptive AI traffic analysis box, but they won't publicly admit to doing so. He said use OpenVPN on the https port because they don't block OpenVPN since it runs on ports that are used by legitimate services and a lot of businesses use it.

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As to using latest versions, this is one of a handful of programs that I actually compile from source.  I'm running 2.7.3 which is the latest.  2.7.1 is old now and 2.7.2 introduced two bug fixes, one that can potentially leak packets on handshake and one that affects servers.  Debian packages are rarely fully up to date with the latest releases and definitely not on the day of the new release dropping.

Used to use it years back, but a lot of it's ad blocking features are better achieved at the browser level, via say ublock origin.  You can also do a system wide adblock using the hosts files found at https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm which I also tend to deploy as a more blanket effort against the ad companies.

Nowadays I find Ublock with all blocklists enabled gets rid of 95% of all ads, but some keep sneaking through (duckduckgo, facebook).  In the grand scheme of things i don't use the products from FB much so it doesn't bother me.

When i did use Privoxy, I only used defaults.  I think that was probably about 15-20 years back.